A new vision for legal learning

The twentieth century has been significant in the development of legal education worldwide. Taking the USA and India for example, India witnessed a boom of National Law Universities and the USA saw an increase in the number of law schools.

Along with the growing strength of students and faculty members, many new challenges started to pour in.

With an all-time high rate of applications, an increasing number of fresh graduates are seen thronging the highly structured job market. Parallelly, the law firms and legal departments in the corporate sector also started to expand in an unprecedented fashion. The effects of these mammoth developments were captured by a study conducted by Harvard Law School. Strikingly, the statistics also suggested that lawyers moved away from joining the legal profession the longer they were out of law school.

With the practice of law becoming a big business with many intrinsic, complicated layers and an increased need for specialised legal practitioners, what are the immediate implications?

The new trends in the profession largely point towards the need for lifelong law school-sponsored ties with its alumni in the form of continuing legal education. Continuing legal education is mandatory in some states in USA. This consists of professional education of lawyers after they qualify for the Bar, or after graduation. Although continuing legal education is not mandatory in India, takeaways from the American experience become important.

As there is a similar growth in law admission applications in India and the US, and a large number of law graduates passing out every year, continuing legal education should now be viewed as an integral part of legal training.

Opportunity for law schools

Continuing legal education provides ample opportunities for law schools to not only connect with their alumni but also help them realise the institutions’ commitment to the legal fraternity. Needless to say, this is an area where institutions can curate courses and
re-skill, re-educate the thousands of
law graduates who leave school every year.

With the technological revolution in the legal profession being accelerated by the onset of the pandemic, existing lawyers and new lawyers coming into the profession need to make themselves technologically adept and update their legal knowledge in the intersecting areas of law and technology.

If anything, the pandemic has virtually connected the legal profession agnostic of geographical challenges and the huge number of webinar sessions that were hosted in the last two years by law schools in the country stands testament to that fact.

Virtual learning

By way of continuing e-legal education, practitioners, jurists should all be accorded an opportunity to attend virtual bootcamps, choose credit or non-credit courses from a wide variety that may be knowledge or skill-based or a combination of both. This is a huge opportunity for law schools to break conventional geographical barriers and collaborate with leading global universities to offer courses in new emerging areas to re-skill legal fraternity.

Law schools should facilitate on-demand examinations for credit courses and connect with their faculty to offer interdisciplinary training. Continuing e-legal education curriculum should endeavour to capture all interactions between law, technology and entrepreneurship.

A liberal framework curriculum will effectively assist legal professionals to curate their courses thereby making them industry-ready.

Apart from this, it is imperative to initiate the process of adopting blended learning in approaching law subjects using ICT tools through developing massive open online courses, which is a mantle that may be shouldered and shared between law schools, the Bar Council of India and State Bar Councils.

By drawing an analogy from a proverb, in this technologically advanced world law schools should not restrict themselves to the dissemination of information but rather aim to empower legal professionals with necessary skill sets.

(The authors are educationists)